Senate reform goes centre stage

By Colby Cosh - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 10:35 AM - 12 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Last week’s Throne Speech was expected to be bereft of surprises. As it happened, a cranky Senate page with a handmade sign ensured that the event wasn’t a complete bore. But there was another, subtler eyebrow-raiser in the works. Despite prior reports of Conservative caucus dissension over Senate reform, Governor General David Johnston’s scripted words expressed the Prime Minister’s determination to act fast on it. Reform “remains a priority for our government,” Johnston reported, promising to reintroduce legislation—thwarted by weighty Oppositions in the past—“to limit term lengths and to encourage provinces and territories to hold elections for Senate nominees.”

The Conservative plan to tweak the Senate without opening up a politically unthinkable Constitution-amending process seems about to take its long-awaited first step. And that implies a reignition of the debate over whether a prime minister can actually get away with such a thing. Quebec’s government is already threatening to haul the feds before the Supreme Court to block term-limit and Senate-election legislation. “If they try that, the Court is literally going to laugh at them,” says a confident Sen. Bert Brown, the Conservative reform advocate elected as an Alberta “senator-in-waiting” in 2004 and appointed to the upper house in 2007.

Constitutional scholars are unsure whether Brown is right. The government’s theory is that there is no “manifest conflict”—to use the phrase of Simon Fraser University political scientist Andrew Heard—between Senate elections and the text of the Constitution. The Constitution merely says that the governor general will “summon qualified persons to the Senate”; it does not say Parliament cannot invent new methods of making candidates available for his consideration.

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Addition by subtraction

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 3, 2011 at 11:42 AM - 2 Comments

While the government pursues a larger House and a reformed Senate, former MP Reginald Stackhouse argues we need neither.

In a time when cutting a gargantuan deficit has to be a government priority, reducing the cost of the Commons should surely come ahead of cutting health care – especially when its work could be done better by fewer rather than more MPs. Parliament – as the name itself indicates – should primarily be a place for debate, and that purpose could be fulfilled by a reduced membership better than by an increased one. But is it likely to happen? Not when a government proposes something as senseless as preserving the Senate. 

The call came from inside the house

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 2, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 21 Comments

Among those quibbling with Stephen Harper’s plans to reform the Senate: Stephen Harper’s Senators.

“There are a lot of unintended consequences from an elected Senate,” Conservative Senator Michael MacDonald told Postmedia News. “(Not only) in terms of its relationship . . . with the House of Commons, its relationship with the government of the day and the relationship of the (senators) with their own provincial governments. These things have to be looked at because . . . the long-term implications are pretty significant.”

People often complain the Senate is illegitimate and not democratic but, MacDonald said, “the Senate wasn’t set up to be elected.” ”It was set up to be a deliberative body and not an elected body and it’s been that way for 147 years and for the most part, it seems it has worked pretty well,” he said.

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 at 12:16 PM - 8 Comments

Senator Hugh Segal is proposing a Senate reform referendum.

Conservative Senator Hugh Segal thinks its high time they were. He has introduced a motion in the Senate for a referendum on Senate abolition, status quo or reform twice already and is set to do so again, even as the Harper government introduces its legislation (which he supports). Any such referendum would be advisory, rather than binding, but it would be hard for any provincial leader to ignore the democratic will, if it were expressed strongly enough. “I don’t know why anyone would be afraid to give Canadians a chance to have their say,” he said.

Reform or bust

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 1:59 PM - 13 Comments

In response to Stephen Harper’s proposed Senate reforms, the Quebec government says it will see the Prime Minister in court. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty suggests it would be best to simply abolish the Senate. Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter says reform has to involve the provinces, but equally wonders about the Senate’s reason for being.

“My position on the Senate in the past has been that I think the House of Commons is elected for the purpose of representing the people of the country,” he said. “The upper house is not necessary.”

'Right now, if Harper wanted to, he could be a complete dictator'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 5:38 PM - 85 Comments

Senator Bert Brown explains why we need a Senate quite unlike the one we have now.

Conservative Sen. Bert Brown, who has been travelling across the country selling provincial premiers on Harper’s reform plans, told Postmedia News he wasn’t pleased by this week’s appointments and knows they have set off a firestorm. “That’s not what I want to see for the next generation, but (Harper) is legally . . . able to do that,” Brown said. “I’ll be honest with you, I think it will stir up the populace to say it’s time we had an elected Senate.”

Brown said abolishing the Senate isn’t a solution because, not only does it require reopening the Constitution, it would also mean that, “somewhere down the line, we could have a prime minister, with a majority government, who would be able to do anything.” “He would have no opposition, he could just pass bills, and how much damage could he do to do the country?” Brown, the only elected senator, asked. That’s why, Brown said, a strong Senate that reflects the will of the provinces is needed. “Right now, if Harper wanted to, he could be a complete dictator, because there is no way to stop a majority government,” he said.

The chamber of second chances

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 5:32 PM - 13 Comments

Jeff Jedras counts 11 defeated Conservative candidates in the Senate.

Sending people that quit the Senate to run for the House and lost back to the Senate was a new twist, but still, the list of failed candidates appointed to the Red Chamber by Harper was already long, and includes Salma Ataullahjan, Yonah Martin, Claude Carignan, Fabian Manning (now twice), Michel Rivard, John Wallace, Leo Houskas, Michael Fortier and Suzanne Duplessis. And now add Larry Smith and Josee Verner to the list, making 11 Conservative Senate appointments have been rejected (at least once) by the electorate.

And now a word from Brad Wall

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 2:07 PM - 11 Comments

Noted democracy advocate Brad Wall laments for Stephen Harper’s latest Senate appointments.

“I think it takes away momentum for change at the provincial level and it will probably increase calls that we hear from time to time just saying, ‘Do we really need this institution?’” Wall told reporters at the provincial legislature Wednesday.

Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter is also unimpressed.

Got Senate reform if you want it

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 9:02 AM - 98 Comments

I can think of three possible explanations for Stephen Harper’s feckless approach to the Senate. Two speak to his long term strategic goals:

1. He hopes to spur real reform to make the Senate a more effective and legitimate federal institution.

or

2. He doesn’t want reform. What wants is to exacerbate and accelerate the decline of federal institutions, in order to further undermine Ottawa’s legitimacy in the eyes of Canadians.

But there’s a third possibility, which is that

3. For Harper,  Senate reform is just a tactical device designed to placate his base, enrage the opposition, and titillate the media.

My belief is that Harper’s strategic goal is (2), and he’s happy to engage in (3) to the extent that it might also result in (2). But let’s adopt the principle of charity and assume that Harper actually wants to reform the Senate in order to improve the federal government. Or if that’s too much of a mental stretch, let’s pretend that we had a prime minister who actually cared about the legitimacy and effectiveness of federal institutions. How should we reform the Senate?

Let me take the occasion to once again break a lance for Campbell Sharman’s 2008 paper for the IRPP on how to give political legitimacy to an un-elected Senate.

What bedevils the debate over the Senate  is the assumption, shared by  reformers and abolitionists alike, is that the status quo is  intolerable in a modern democracy and the only way to give the Senate  any legitimacy is to turn it into an elective chamber. Sometimes, though, it takes an outsider to give your slumbering dogmas a shake.    Continue…

Senate appointments: "There oughtta be a law"

By John Geddes - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 4:29 PM - 112 Comments

There is no appointment to the Senate that sits well with me. The patronage chamber is an affront to democracy no matter who gets to ride its gravy train. But to appoint individuals who have only just been rejected by the voters in an election, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper did today, compounds the insult.

Jack Layton commented on this very situation during the recent campaign when he talked to Maclean’s editors and writers. The NDP leader alluded to the day in the House back in 2007 when Harper seemed open, if only for a tantalizing moment, to the idea that the Senate could be abolished after a referendum.

“Stephen Harper was getting frustrated and he said essentially, well, y’know if certain things don’t happen, maybe we should have a referendum on the Senate,” Layton recalled.

“We kind of came that close, but then he saw the opportunity to put in an awful lot of his friends, even defeated candidates. Now, why doesn’t that get commentators more upset? Defeated members of Parliament! Somebody who is turfed out, then getting appointed to the Senate! I mean, pardon me, but there oughtta be a law.”

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If you think it's bad now…

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 1:07 PM - 52 Comments

A Conservative senator defends the Senate’s decision to allow senators to continue sending partisan attacks through the mail, just so long as they don’t attack other senators.

David Tkachuk, chair of the committee on internal economy, budgets and administration, said he sees nothing wrong with partisan newsletters but his committee will revisit the issue later this month or next. “My newsletters in the 90s that I used to put out were way more partisan than anything that has been out there,” the Tory senator said Tuesday, after receiving more than 100 e-mails.

In other news, public support for abolishing the Senate has grown over the last four years.

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 1:52 PM - 36 Comments

Jack Layton pitches Senate reforms.

“Unfortunately, today’s Senate is too often just partisans working for their parties while being paid with public money. No ‘sober second thought’ can come from unelected appointees with such an obvious conflict of interest,” said Layton. “Let’s take two small – but important – steps towards a more accountable Senate. First, remove all failed candidates and party insiders from the Senate. Secondly, let’s make sure all Senators stop fundraising for political parties.”

How do you feel about the Senate abolishing a climate change bill adopted by the House of Commons?

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 22, 2010 at 3:48 PM - 65 Comments

The red shift

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 3:41 PM - 0 Comments

Liberal senator Grant Mitchell contemplates the potential possibilities and pitfalls of senate reform.

Electing Senators will cause a massive shift of power from the Prime Minister, from the House of Commons and from provincial Premiers to the Senate. As elected Senators they can (and they will) hold up legislation and budgets which will diminish the power of the House of Commons. Since there are, for example, only 6 Senators in Alberta compared to 28 MPs, they will have more prominence and the power that goes with it. When elected, Senators will more aggressively exercise their role in representing regional rights and will take the power to do that from where it resides now, with the Premiers. I often ask people to name 5 members of the US House of Representatives, 5 Governors and then 5 US Senators. For most, it is way easier to name Senators than either Governors or a Congress Person. That’s because the US Senate, elected as it is, is the most powerful institution in US government.

A week and a half in the public life of Michael Ignatieff

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 80 Comments

Suggesting new constraints on a Prime Minister’s power to request prorogation? Pitching specific measures to deal with unemployment? Promising to restore funding to Status of Women Canada? Talking of a national strategy on brain disease? Proposing Senate reform? Committing himself to child care? Speaking sharply about the Karzai administration? And now preemptively opening discussion on potentially contentious questions of foreign policy?

What, precisely, has gotten into the leader of the Her Majesty’s loyal opposition?

Will the last country on earth to use first-past-the-post please turn out the lights?

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 101 Comments

British PM plans to ditch first-past-the-post

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced he will seek parliamentary approval for a referendum to ditch the first-past-the-post voting system for Westminster elections.

Mr Brown said that the switch to the Alternative Vote system could be part of a “new politics” which would restore public trust in Westminster in the wake of last year’s expenses scandal.

In a wide-ranging package of planned reforms, he also confirmed that a draft Bill to create a democratically accountable House of Lords will be published within the next few weeks.

And he gave his backing to parliamentary reforms to give MPs more power over the running of the Commons, new avenues for public petitions to be submitted for debate in the House and the swifter release of official documents under Freedom of Information laws…

It is thought that the Commons will vote on the issue before it rises for its half-term break next Wednesday, and Mr Brown’s spokesman this morning insisted that enough parliamentary time remains for it to reach the statute book ahead of the election, which must take place by June 3.

Mr Brown confirmed that he will campaign for a move to AV – under which voters rank candidates in numerical order, rather than simply placing an X on the ballot paper – in the referendum, which he said should be held by October 2011.

So that’s reform of the upper house, more power for MPs, and electoral reform, in one go. Must be nice to live in a country that can, you know, do things.

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, February 1, 2010 at 8:02 AM - 64 Comments

Michael Ignatieff proposes senate reform.

Ignatieff proposed a 12-year term limit on Senate positions and an arms-length committee tasked with vetting candidates. ”I’d even go as far as to limit the prime minister’s prerogative to appoint senators. That is, I’d pass (appointments) through a public service appointment commission, so we scrub it and get the best possible appointees.”

NDP challenge Harper to do what he said he'd do

By Andrew Potter - Monday, January 11, 2010 at 9:22 AM - 22 Comments

From a new NDP press release:

OTTAWA—New Democrats today challenged Stephen Harper to, as a bare minimum, place enforceable term-limits on the next round of Senate appointments, a long promised policy of the Conservative Party.

“Mr. Harper’s record on Senate reform is long on rhetoric, and short on action,” said New Democrat Democratic Reform Critic David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre). “Making new Senators agree to an enforceable term limit, as Mr. Harper has repeatedly promised, would be a modest step toward Senate reform.”

I have a column in the Citizen today arguing that if Harper is serious about Senate reform, the appointments process is the place to focus his attention. Except I don’t actually think that Harper cares about Senate reform one way or another; like abortion in the US, it is one of those useful issues that Conservatives in Canada use to keep their base on a low boil. They are always just about to do something about it, though they never seem to get there. Senate reform for Harper is a tactical device, not part of a serious strategic agenda.

Put me in next year, coach!

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 6:05 PM - 8 Comments

Stephen Harper once had this to say about Canada’s cozy and important upper house: “Canadians understand that our Senate, as it stands today, must either change, or, like the old upper houses of our provinces, vanish.” Granted, this was over two years ago, more than enough time for any politician to make their supposedly heartfelt convictions go poof. And there it is: a year and a bit into his mandate and Harper has been appointing senators–who, if the Harper of yore is to be believed, are unelected, (at least) $132,300-a-pop professional thumbsuckers steeped in patronage–like your average power-drunk Liberal: 27 jowly, carbon-emitting pontificators in a single year. Far from ushering it into well-deserved oblivion, Harper seems instead intent on making sure the Senate has a very long, very blue future. Mein Gott.

But then, like a pack of avenging angels sent from the heavens of Quebecor, Le Journal de Montréal arrived on the (virtual) doorstep and laid waste to my pitiful knee-jerk cynicism. One look at the front page picture of possibly-still-illiterate former Habs coach-cum-Honorable Member Jacques Demers in all his pasty, bespectacled glory and it hit me: Harper has clung to his principles all along. By appointing a completely unqualified, barely literate hockey oaf who hardly bothers to show up, and who literally broadcasts his potential conflicts-of-interest on cable television, our Prime Minister is rubbing our noses in the sheer futility of the institution. He’s destroying the senate from the inside. It’s Machiavellian, Clausewitzian and even Sun Tzu-ian. An explanation after this here jump.

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A portrait of Canada's political culture (Part 1)

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, August 28, 2009 at 2:01 PM - 85 Comments

As ever with Stephen Harper, there is an in-your-face element to the latest batch of Senate appointments. It’s almost as if he said to himself, okay, if I’m going to get slammed for these appointments anyway, what are the most obnoxiously partisan, disgustingly sycophantic choices I can make? I know — I’ll name my former press flack! No, wait — I’ll name the president of the party! Or maybe — yes! — the most hyper-partisan, Grit-hating thug I know, my former campaign manager!

I’ve got it! I’ll appoint all of them!

Yes, I know, the Liberals did just the same for years — the same Grits who are now assailing the appointments, just as the Tories used to attack theirs. This is the cycle we have become caught in, each party justifying its own excesses by the other’s, each hypocritically accusing the other of hypocrisy. And the public, educated by long useage to expect no better, cannot even be roused to outrage any more. Time was when this sort of flagrant cronyism would have caused a scandal. Certainly in any other country it would. But not here, not any more.

We have a deeply, deeply cynical political culture, and the Senate is a big part of it. A country that teaches itself to accept that one of its two legislative bodies should be composed almost entirely of appointed party hacks and bagmen (the other being made up of obedient ciphers) can accommodate itself to a great many things.

Our tolerance for separatism acted in much the same way. We knew it was wrong, but we told ourselves it was right: that the reason we tolerated the intolerable — a perpetual threat to destroy the country unless ransom was paid, in larger and larger installments — was not because we were weak and fearful, but because we were decent and wise. Thus fear begat shame, and shame begat rationalization, and rationalization begat our current state of affairs: total amorality.

I suppose you can mount some sort of chess-playing rationale for Harper’s latest descent: he had to appoint somebody — might as well be people whose loyalty he can depend upon; with a majority in the Senate as early as next year, he’ll be in a better position to pass Senate reform; if he’d appointed respectable, upstanding pillars-of-the-community types, the kind with cross-party support, he’d simply be rehabilitating the status quo. So you see, by appointing egregious partisan hacks, he’s actually still a reformer.

But if that’s his strategy, why be so timid about it? Why not appoint his horse? Or convicted criminals? Colin Thatcher to the Senate!

'A better democracy'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 7:02 PM - 81 Comments

Conservative election platform, 2006. Canada is a democracy, yet our democratic system has not kept pace with the needs of a changing society. Paul Martin used to talk about a democratic deficit, but his actions as Prime Minister have deepened it. A new Conservative government will be committed to significant democratic reform of our Parliamentary and electoral institutions.

Canwest News Service, tonight. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is preparing to reward some of his longest-serving and most loyal political operatives with Senate appointments that could come as early as this week, Canwest News Service has learned. Doug Finley, who has been the political master strategist for the Conservative party in its first four general elections, will lead a pack of eight Senate appointees that includes Carolyn Stewart-Olsen, who was Harper’s second-longest serving aide before her retirement this summer, and Don Plett, who will have to resign as president of the Conservative Party of Canada if he accepts the $132,000-a-year job as senator.

On Two-tier Senators

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 12:10 PM - 30 Comments

And so, with the economy booming and the country’s books shipshape, we can now return to the pressing topic of Senate reform.

Today, Steven Fletcher introduced a bill to set term limits for new senators: eight years, non-renewable. after which they are pasture-ized, and given “the same severance as Members of the House of Commons.”

Whoops, did I say new senators? Not quite. The press release hasn’t been posted yet, but the new bill will apply to all senators appointed after the 2008 General Election, including the 18 that Harper appointed in a panic.

I’m not sure how this is supposed to work. Were Duffy, Brazeau, et al told that this bill was in the works? Was it a condition of appointment that these new senators promise to support this legislation? Is that legal?

I’m genuinely at sea here, not sure what I think about this. So like everything else, I toss it out to the crowd.

Harper on Senate reform

By Paul Wells - Monday, March 2, 2009 at 3:28 PM - 46 Comments

From the Inkless emailbox:

ALBERTA CAUCUS OF SENATORS-ELECT

An interview with Prime Minister Harper

On January 24th, 2009, Prime Minister Stephen Harper took time with Alberta
senators-elect Link Byfield and Betty Unger to discuss Senate elections and
the need to raise the public profile of the issue. Unger and Byfield are
now assembling a national organization to promote Senate elections, with
leadership and membership from all provinces.

Harper: First, I would like to thank both of you for your continued efforts
on Senate reform. You have been actively working with Senator Brown and
other Canadians for the past couple of years on this issue, and we need
people like yourselves putting this forward. As I have found out the hard
way, Senate reform is, at best, a long process that will require vision and
dedication. Continue…

Packing the Senate to reform it

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, December 11, 2008 at 6:58 PM - 53 Comments

About those impending Senate appointments:

It’s certainly another broken promise, which if memory serves was to appoint only elected senators. But the Liberals are hardly in a position to complain since a) they’d have done the same thing, and have for decades, and b) they’re opposed to electing senators, at least under the current setup.  

There is an extra unseemliness in light of the prorogation of Parliament. He is still in law the Prime Minister of Canada, but his legitimacy is under something of a cloud, having prorogued rather than face a confidence vote (although it’s worth speculating whether he would in fact have been defeated in that vote — I suspect the Liberals might well have gotten cold feet on the day, in light of the pasting they were taking in the polls). His spokesman seems to admit as much: they’re making the appointments now rather than wait for the government to be defeated and let the coalition do it. The problem with that explanation: the coalition is not going to defeat them, because the coalition is dead. I think they’re using the coalition threat to justify what they were planning to do anyway. See, for example, John Ivison’s piece in the November 24 National Post — days before the fiscal update.

But it is a prime ministerial prerogative to appoint Senators, and there is no tradition in this country of appointing them on anything but a strictly partisan basis. It’s the Senate, in other words, that’s the scandal.

I’d judge these particular appointments by two criteria: the quality of the appointees, and whether they move the Senate closer to reform or not. On the latter, it’s been reported that Harper will make the appointments conditional on a pledge to support the government’s proposed Senate reforms – stalled for months in the Senate, and dead with prorogation – when these are reintroduced in the Upper House. These would limit Senate terms to eight years and require Senators to be elected to be eligible for appointment; the new appointees would be expected not only to vote for these principles, but to apply them to themselves.  I’d support that, and I don’t agree with my colleage Andrew Potter that this constitutes some sort of improper inducement. If the Prime Minister can insist that they vote with the Conservatives generally as a condition of appointment, he can surely insist they vote with the Conservatives on a particular bill.

So I’m willing to cut Harper a little slack, here. His bona fides as a Senate reformer are not in doubt — indeed, he’s taken considerable flak for it, both in Parliament and in the media. He has appointed only two Senators since he came to power, one of whom was elected (Alberta’s Bert Brown). He’d have appointed more elected Senators, it is fair to assume, had his reform bill passed the Senate. Still, it looks odd: appointing Senators in order to elect them, patronage in the service of reform.